<?php
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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Getting tested',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2019/03.jpg" alt="A squirrel on my front steps" class="framed-centred-image" width="800" height="480"/>
<section id="diet">
	<h2>Dietary intake</h2>
	<p>
		I wanted to rush to the lab today, so instead of a formal breakfast, I just grabbed an energy bar.
		I ended up eating a real breakfast when I got home though.
		Having made three bike trips to Eugene this morning, I deserved a second breakfast.
		I made two sandwiches, both with dairy-free cheese, a veggie patty, ketchup, mustard, and a pickle.
		I also chopped up three potatoes into strips, French fry style, but baked them instead of frying them.
		I had one of the sandwiches for dinner at work, and the other one I cut in half and had for breakfast and lunch with the baked fries and ketchup.
		I also had 241 grams of mixed juice when I got home from work.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="post-vasectomy">
	<h2>Post-vasectomy semen analysis</h2>
	<p>
		I&apos;m still in utter disbelief that I actually got a vasectomy.
		How is an animal such as myself that is so adamantly opposed to creating offspring allowed to exist!?
		As a virgin, having never even risked the possibility of children, I went and got a surgical modification to ensure I never could have children accidentally.
		How was genetics that would allow me to be this way not weeded out of the gene pool centuries (if not millennia or even eons) ago?
		Don&apos;t get me wrong.
		I made the right choice and I don&apos;t regret it in the slightest.
		But how was I even <strong>*capable*</strong> of making the right choice?
	</p>
	<p>
		Anyway, I woke up much earlier than I wanted to this morning.
		I didn&apos;t set an alarm or anything, it sort of just happened.
		I knew by the time I could bike to the lab, it&apos;d be open, and that was if I didn&apos;t collect the semen sample or get dressed, so there was really no point in waiting to get started.
		I&apos;ve been dying to have the results for months now, but I had to wait for the residual sperm to leave my body.
		I showered, got dressed, ate an energy bar, then collected the sample and rode away.
		Honestly, I should have done this yesterday, but it wouldn&apos;t&apos;ve worked out anyway, with the missionaries eating up twice their scheduled amount of my time, needing to get the discussion question researched and my discussion post written, and getting to the $a[EUGLUG] meeting.
		Postponing it by a day worked well for me, and I guess it wasn&apos;t something that needed to be done right away.
	</p>
	<p>
		I biked down to the lab, keeping the sample jar in my underwear, as I was instructed to keep it as close to body temperature as I could.
		When I got to the &quot;lab&quot; though, I found is wsn&apos;t much of a lab at all.
		As best I can tell, they don&apos;t actually analyse anything there.
		They just take the various samples brought to them and mail them to Portland, where the actual lab is, for analysis.
		Are they going to keep the sample warm in the mail, too?
		If so, how?
		If not, it doesn&apos;t really matter whether I kept it warm myself, so why was I instructed to do so?
		Also, my sample won&apos;t be analysed until Monday or Tuesday.
		Why was I instructed to get my sample to the &quot;lab&quot; in under an hour?
		It not going to matter that I did.
		If I&apos;d brought it just after the weekend, they said it wouldn&apos;t take as long before it was analysed, so I expressed my concern about any potential sperm dying.
		After all, I was told that there might still be some dead sperm lingering in my semen after the twelve week mark, and that&apos;d be fine.
		I wasn&apos;t so sure it&apos;d be fine myself, as if even a single sex cell was found, it might indicate that one or both of the vas deferens had reconnected, and that by luck, a live sperm might make it through within its life span.
		If I was told there were dead sperm cells, I was going to ask my doctor to redo the test in about a year.
		But in any case, I wasn&apos;t sure how detailed the results would be, and if the doctor would just be told about the success or failure of the vasectomy based on the live sperm count being (or not being) at zero, so I thought it mattered whether any potentially-live sperm died during the wait.
		Apparently, it doesn&apos;t matter.
		They&apos;re going to check to see if any sperm, living or dead, are in the sample, and if there are, the vasectomy will be considered a failure.
		With this contradictory information, someone must have given me bad data.
		I&apos;m hoping it was the surgeon.
		Honestly, I would feel much safer if I knew there was no sperm cells whatsoever in my semen, even dead ones.
		If any sperm cells are found, I want to count that as a failure, or at the very least, a prompt for another testing on a later date.
	</p>
	<p>
		So after leaving the &quot;lab&quot;, I biked straight to the clinic in which the vasectomy had been performed, so as to make an appointment to get the results.
		They were closed.
		It&apos;d be over an hour until they opened.
		So I biked home, got lunch and dinner started, wrote up my report on what had happened so far, then turned off the oven and biked back to the clinic.
		Before heading out, I reread the instructions from the clinic, and they said I&apos;d be contacted via telephone by the clinic within ten business days (fourteen calendar days) of submitting the sample.
		Obviously, they won&apos;t contact me because I have no telephone service, and if I did, I wouldn&apos;t&apos;ve given them the number.
		It meant though that I should set up my appointment for about two weeks after today, instead of setting one for this coming Tuesday as I&apos;d initially planned to do.
	</p>
	<p>
		At the clinic, I was first told that because I&apos;d taken my sample to the &quot;lab&quot; today, it would be a couple weeks before they had the results.
		I explained that I was aware of that, and was trying to set up the appointment for a couple weeks away.
		I was then told they&apos;d telephone me when the results came in, so I could set my appointment up then.
		I reminded them that I&apos;ve got no telephone service, and that they have no telephone number on record on my account.
		They had to go talk to someone in another room to figure out what to do then.
		When they got back, they told me I didn&apos;t need an appointment, and to just come in in a couple weeks.
		But also, because they don&apos;t have a telephone number on file for me, they&apos;ll mail me the results, so I don&apos;t even need to come in.
		(That is, assuming they actually <strong>*do*</strong> mail the results; I&apos;ve been told medical professionals will mail me something in the past, and they don&apos;t always follow through.)
		So assuming they do actually mail the results, that means that I don&apos;t have to come in and get them because I don&apos;t have telephone service, but if I did have service, I&apos;d have to come in to get the results after they let me know the results were in.
		Not having telephone service is getting me better service from the clinic.
	</p>
	<p>
		So anyway, I&apos;ll wait the two weeks, then if the results haven&apos;t shown up in the mail, I&apos;ll come in for them.
		I don&apos;t know how long to wait for them to come through the mail, but I&apos;m eager to know if the procedure was a success.
		I don&apos;t want to have to get the vasectomy redone, but if I do need to, I want to know as soon as possible.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion post for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			A lot of security problems are caused due to mishandling of data by trusted parties.
			When you trust the wrong people, the results aren&apos;t great.
			Having an audit trail is essential for security.
			For some people, knowing what they do in the database could be audited at any time will keep them from doing anything overly bad with the data.
			For anyone else, it allows them to be caught and removed from the organisation if audits are carried out regularly.
			Of course, the database administrator can usually get around the logs, but for everyone else, having the database administrator set up audit logs can be a huge step toward making sure data is well-handled.
		</p>
		<p>
			Unfortunately, database audit tools perform terribly when not explicitly configured well due to their quirks.
			Apparently, it&apos;s pretty normal for drastically slow down your database and causing it to use about fifty percent more resources <a href="http://docs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_100229/item_410520/IBM_sSecurity_SO%23034252_E-Guide_051811.pdf">(Lane, 2011)</a>.
			For those of you that are bad at percentages, that means one third of the resources of the database could be wasted on logging.
			(Logging is causing fifty percent <strong>*more*</strong> resource usage, meaning that we&apos;re at one hundred fifty percent resource usage compared to not having the logging.
			That means about 33% of the <strong>*current*</strong> total is wasted on logging, not 50%, so it&apos;s not the case that half the resource usage is spent on logging, which would be even worse.)
		</p>
		<p>
			To help decide the right configurations to use for auditing, it&apos;s helpful to first try some experiments with a test database instead of the live database.
			You can run the test database without auditing to get baseline statistics, then try different auditing options to see how they affect performance.
			There are different auditing methods you can try, though which ones are available to you will depend on your database software.
			You can try different configurations of the methods as well.
			Again, what can be configured will depend on which database software you use <a href="http://docs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_100229/item_410520/IBM_sSecurity_SO%23034252_E-Guide_051811.pdf">(Lane, 2011)</a>.
		</p>
		<p>
			Audit data can also take way too much space in the database.
			It&apos;s a good idea to write scripts that will periodically archive the audit data to files, then expunge that data from the database itself, so the tables don&apos;t overflow.
			Auditing can also be handled by dedicated drives for better performance, though there&apos;s still a memory issue; logging takes up a lot of memory.
			You can basically configure a trade-off between disk use and memory though <a href="http://docs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_100229/item_410520/IBM_sSecurity_SO%23034252_E-Guide_051811.pdf">(Lane, 2011)</a>.
			By holding more in memory, you don&apos;t need to write as often, but in exchange, more memory gets used.
			Conversely, you can cut down on memory usage by writing to disk more frequently, but it takes time to move the write head into position, and you&apos;ll be doing that more often, not to mention that the database software will need to wait its turn to access the filesystem.
		</p>
		<p>
			Filtering events before logging them can drastically reduce overhead <a href="http://docs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_100229/item_410520/IBM_sSecurity_SO%23034252_E-Guide_051811.pdf">(Lane, 2011)</a>.
			Some things simply don&apos;t need to be logged, so logging them isn&apos;t helpful and just wastes resources.
			Some things absolutely need to be logged, some would be helpful to have logged, and others are complete garbage taking up space in the log.
			Filter out the garbage, and see if the logging overhead has been reduced to acceptable levels.
			If not, filter out the stuff that isn&apos;t strictly necessary for improved performance.
		</p>
		<div class="APA_references">
			<h3>References:</h3>
			<p>
				Lane, A. (2011, May 20). <a href="http://docs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_100229/item_410520/IBM_sSecurity_SO%23034252_E-Guide_051811.pdf">Database audit trail and compliance, database audit tools: auditing methods, configurations and filtering options</a>. Retrieved from <code>http://docs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_100229/item_410520/IBM_sSecurity_SO%23034252_E-Guide_051811.pdf</code>
			</p>
		</div>
	</blockquote>
</section>
END
);
